Murders down in 2014

Murders were down by 60 percent in Monmouth and Ocean counties in 2014, as fatal gun and gang violence took a marked dip, authorities said.

The number of murders in the two Shore counties totaled eight in 2014, compared to 20 in 2013, according to statistics provided by the offices of the Monmouth and Ocean prosecutors.

Five of the murders in 2014 were in Monmouth County — one each in Asbury Park, Freehold and Hazlet, and a double killing in Long Branch. Officials say all four cases have been solved. The Hazlet murder also involved a suicide.

Three of the murders in 2014 were in Ocean County — two in Lakewood and one in Brick. The two Lakewood cases so far are unsolved.

In 2013, there were 13 murders in Monmouth County and seven in Ocean County, including two unsolved cases in Monmouth County.

“We’re really happy in the change this year over last year,” acting Monmouth County Prosecutor Christopher J. Gramiccioni said. “By no means are we declaring victory. We’d like to see the number go down to zero.”

The statistics show a marked decrease in gunshot murders in both counties in 2014: There were two murder victims shot to death — one in Asbury Park in Monmouth County and one in Lakewood in Ocean County. That compares to nine murder victims who were shot to death in the two counties in 2013.

Gramiccioni couldn’t say for sure why shooting deaths were down, but he said it seems some efforts by his office, including a guns-for-cash program and a full-time narcotics and gang task force, may be paying off.

“We know generally who the bad guys are in the county,” he said. “We target the worst of the worst. We wait until we have evidence, catch them committing a crime and we take them off the streets.”

Capt. Vincent Frulio of the Ocean County prosecutor’s major crimes unit noted the downturn in fatal gun and gang violence in his jurisdiction in recent years.

“We haven’t seen a lot of gang-style murders down here in the last couple of years,” Frulio said. “It was pretty bad. It’s hard to say what has deterred it.”

Frulio noted, however, that law enforcement cracked down on gang activity following the murder in 2011 of Lakewood police officer Christopher Matlosz, the first and only law enforcement officer shot to death in Ocean County.

“We cracked down and shut down the Bloods in this area,” Frulio said. “Perhaps they moved to a different area.”

Some of the deadly violence this year involved people with familial or other close relationships — the type of killings that authorities say they have little control over.

They included the beating death May 24 of 94-year-old Mary Driscoll in Brick, in Ocean County, and four strangulations in Monmouth County, that of Lecenay Fermin Gallegos, 31, in Freehold Borough on May 16; Joan Colbert, 62, and her 10-year-old foster daughter, Veronica Roach, in Long Branch on Aug. 1; and most recently, that of Christine Dzienisiewski, 37, in Hazlet, on Saturday.

Authorities said Dzienisiewski, a mother of two, was killed in her home in an apparent murder-suicide. Her husband, Richard, also 37, was found dead in the home of a self-inflicted stab wound, authorities said.

Colbert’s cousin, Brian Farmer, 58, an ex-convict, is accused of committing the Long Branch strangulations. Authorities allege he killed the two after he was caught taking pornographic pictures of the younger victim.

Gallegos’ live-in boyfriend, Sender Neftali Villatoro Reyes, 24, is charged with strangling his girlfriend in the couple’s home in Freehold Borough while their 3-year-old child slept in an adjacent room.

In the Driscoll case in Brick, the victim’s granddaughter, Katherine Schubert, 37, is charged in the elderly woman’s beating death.

The other murders in Ocean County in 2014 were that of William Osorio, 50, of Howell, who was found shot to death in a crashed car on East County Line Road in Lakewood on Aug. 2; and Thomas Estaban, 47, found dead in his home on Coventry Drive in Lakewood on Oct. 14. A pathologist determined Estaban died as a result of internal bleeding and ruled the death a homicide, according to Frulio.

No arrests have been made in either Osorio’s or Estaban’s murders.

An arrest has been made in the Asbury Park murder. In that case, Jacquil Jones, 25, of Farmingdale is charged in the shooting death of Asbury Park resident Jermaine Huntley, 28, on Washington Avenue in the city on April 10.